She had argued a bit shakily after that, and that night she had slept badly.  The next morning they had gone over it again.  “You fainted when the kitten’s paw was crushed in the door.”

“It was dreadful——­”

“And you cried when I cut my foot with the hatchet and we were out in the woods.  And if you are going to be a doctor you’ll have to look at people who are crushed and cut——­”

“Oh, please, Randy——­”

Three days of such intensive argument had settled it.  Becky decided that it was, after all, better to be an authoress.  “There was Louisa Alcott, you know, Randy.”

He was scornful.  “Women weren’t made for that—­to sit in an attic and write.  Why do you keep talking about doing things, Becky?  You’ll get married when you grow up and that will be the end of it.”

“I am not going to get married, Randy.”

“Well, of course you will, and I shall marry and be a lawyer like my father, and perhaps I’ll go to Congress.”

Later he had a leaning towards the ministry.  “If I preached I could make the world better, Becky.”

That was the time when she had come down for Hallowe’en, and it was on Sunday evening that they had talked it over in the Bird Room at Huntersfield.  There had been a smouldering fire on the wide hearth, and the Trumpeter Swan had stared down at them with shining eyes.  They had been to church that morning and the text had been, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

“I want to make the world better, Becky,” Randy had said in the still twilight, and Becky had answered in an awed tone, “It would be so splendid to see you in the pulpit, Randy, wearing a gown like Dr. Hodge.”

But the pulpit to Randy had meant more than that.  And the next day when they walked through the deserted mill town, he had said, “Everybody is dead who lived here, and once they were alive like us.”

She had shivered, “I don’t like to think of it.”

“It’s a thing we’ve all got to think of.  I like to remember that Thomas Jefferson came riding through and stopped at the mill and talked to the miller.”

“How dreadful to know that they are—­dead.”

“Mother says that men like Jefferson never die.  Their souls go marching on.”

The stream which ground the county’s corn was at their feet.  “But what about the miller?” Becky had asked; “does his soul march, too?”

Randy, with the burden of yesterday’s sermon upon him, hoped that the miller was saved.

He smiled now as he thought of the rigidness of his boyish theology.  To him in those days Heaven was Heaven and Hell was Hell.

The years at school had brought doubt—­apostasy.  Then on the fields of France, Randy’s God had come back to him—­the Christ who bound up wounds, who gave a cup of cold water, who fought with flaming sword against the battalions of brutality, who led up and up that white company who gave their lives for a glorious Cause.  Here, indeed, was a God of righteousness and of justice, of tenderness and purity.  To other men than Randy, Christ had in a very personal and specific sense been born across the sea.